In The Beginning Was The Plot.....And The Plot Thickened! Adventures on a Lancashire Allotment & Miscellaneous Musings.

26 January 2007

Cyberid

Elsewhere in the blogosphere there is a discussion taking place about virtual as opposed to 'real' identity. I find this quite interesting from a number of angles. In some cases people worry around what they write and who they are becoming public knowledge and in some cases they are right to be worried as I imagine it is not that technically difficult to out a bloggers real idendity with unhappy consequences.

Probably for the majority of allotment bloggers there is no real problem here; we tend to write mostly about how our tomato seeds are doing and how crap was our garlic last year and about the clarty soil and the sun and the wind and the couch grass and the club 18-30 root. In most cases our blog does exactly what it sais on the tin and that's fine. Some of us (me included), follow our whimsical natures and from time to time go off on one. This amuses some, annoys others and probably most don't really care one way or the other. Sometimes there is a bit of political sniping here and there but nothing to get too excited about. By and large we stick to plants and seeds and spuds and weeds and we inhabit our own polite parochial backwater of the blogosphere quite happily thank you very much.

This does not make us in any sense 'better' than the Let It All Hang Out Blood Guts & Thunder Boardroom or Bedroom bloggers who publish every nuance of their inner lives for all to read. That's fine too. All bloggers just need to bear in mind that if it's an open blog then it's public domain full stop and really so is your identity, even if you delude yourself into believing that you are blogging annonymously behind a stuffed muppet in a tutu called desmond.

Actually, the best of these blogs are fabulous. Well, sometimes beautifully written, witty, insightful, gritty and startlingly honest accounts of personal lives or perceptive comments on culture or society that should (possibly do) leave the professional commentators and lifestyle columnists green. Your blog is what you want it to be. It's your tin, fill it however you like and if it doesn't do exactly what it sais on the tin then so what exactly? I think the whole blogosphere should be celebrated BIGTIME in all its gloriously insane messy entirety. The notion of blog 'awards' is a meaningless anathema. PEOPLE are writing again! YIPPEE! Expressing themselves as freely or as guardedly as they see fit, free of the agendas set by media moghuls, spin doctors, celebrity gossipers or whatever.

They can present themselves with as many cyber identities as they want. They can put out or shut out and I don't give a fiddlers fart who they really are and don't most of us have some sort of filter to sift the real from the contrived anyway? Oh well, clearly I'm running out of steam now, but can I just leave you with this little muse....If Anne Frank had had a laptop and a blog in her silent tiny attic hideaway instead of just a lonely diary with which to share her quiet desperation.....well, maybe the outcome would not have been different but I don't need to spell out what it might have meant to her.

4 comments:

You're quite right, blogs are an amazing opportunity for individual self-expression and free speech on a global level, without government or corporate restraint. And that's really something to celebrate.

I try just to be myself on my blogs. Those who like me will come back for more. Those who don't won't. Seems fair enough.

Thank you. That's a wonderful reminder of why I started blogging in the first place. The problem is when you start to get regular commenters. In the first incarnation of my blog I didn't have comments and felt so much freer for it. Now I have comments I feel much more exposed and much more as if I need to keep some sort of persona going whereas before I didn't give a damn. Hopefully copious amounts of red wine will sort that out.

Ps. What tomatoes are you growing on your windowsill. I was growing Tumbler and something called moneyspinner but they were really disappointing last year!